Reading Room Notes

This month's post will be over on a new blog site, Ure Routes, created as part of my new role as Research Officer at the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology at the University of Reading. In the first month I've been at Reading I've been exploring the early history of the Museum and the University, and finding unexpected connections to my own history of archaeology research. You can read "Reports from Reading" here.

One of the other women credited with contributing to the music for the "Egyptian Matinee" was Kathleen Schlesinger. At the time, I didn't know much about her, but the event programme noted that she provided a number of replica instruments used at the Hippodrome that afternoon from her own collection.

Schlesinger is known in musical theory circles for her work on recreating ancient music, using instruments and tools that she had specially made based on ancient source materials. Nine years after the Hippodrome performance, she published a book, The Greek Aulos, describing her findings.

For decades Schlesinger also held a pioneering research fellowship at the University of Liverpool's Institute of Archaeology. This department was the earliest British-based training institution for archaeologists – being founded decades before the Institute of Archaeology at the University of London (now part of UCL). It instituted a Fellowship in the Archaeology of Music in 1914.

Kathleen Schlesinger was the first Fellow – in fact, Kate Bowen's investigation of the Institute of Archaeology's Annual Reports reveals that the Fellowship was designed for her, and her scholarship promoted by John Garstang, then Professor of the Methods and Practice of Archaeology at the Institute. The Fellowship enabled her to continue her research on the ancient history of musical instruments, in which she was already well-established.

By this stage, Schlesinger was also an experienced lecturer, working as an Extension lecturer for the University of London. She is to be added to the ranks of women I've written about in Archaeologists in Printwho organised and delivered lectures and courses at the British Museum, incorporating collections on display into their curricula. Schlesinger also created and delivered a set of lectures on the history of musical instruments in the galleries of the Victoria and Albert Museum. In addition, she was featured as a lecturer at the 1914 Children's Welfare Exhibition at Kensington Olympia, discussing musical instruments to accompany a special display at the event.

While she is now known for her work on ancient Greek music and instruments, she had a wide-ranging field of investigation, and her museum lectures sought to appeal to audiences interested in Biblical history (and by extension the archaeology of the Levant, Egypt/Sudan and Mesopotamia) as well. For these lectures she created models of instruments.

Kate Bowen's detailed research on Schlesinger and her musical collaborator Elsie Hamilton also highlights Schlesinger's role in innovative performances combining music and archaeology before her contributions to Julia Chatterton's 1930 Hippodrome programme. These include, intriguingly, the music for a drama called "Sensa" (the result of a collaboration between two other women, Maud Hoffman and Mabel Collins) which was set in ancient Egypt, and performed in theatres in London in 1914 and 1919.*

In the 1930s, an American musician came to visit an elderly Kathleen Schlesinger in her home in Highgate. He was Harry Partch, and his memory of tea with Schlesinger makes for fascinating reading. She told him about using a British Museum vase as model for her replica kithara, which was made to her specifications by a handy gas-meter man during the First World War out of wood from a crate that had once contained oranges.

Hindson, C. 2017. Beautiful Pagans: When a Best Selling Author and a West End Actress Made a Spiritualist Performance. In Guy, J. (Ed).The Edinburgh Companion to Fin-de-Siècle Literature, Culture and the Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

*The idea for Collins's book Idyll of the White Lotus(on which "Sensa" was based) came to her after seeing Cleopatra's Needle being placed on Embankment in 1878. Collins was very interested in the occult, and spotting the Needle triggered visions of ancient Egyptian priests. Her interpretation of their presence - and through this the inspiration for Idyll and "Sensa" - drew on British Museum Curator Wallis Budge's book Egyptian Magic. For more on Collins, Hoffman, and the creation and performances of "Sensa", see Catherine Hindson's chapter referenced above.

Like many other people I suspect, I’ve been watching American Gods. I’m not familiar with the Neil Gaiman book on which the series is based, but I’m intrigued by the plot's mixture of different cultures’ mythologies.

I grew up reading D’AulairesBook of Greek Myths (first published in 1961), so much so that the family paperback copy literally fell to pieces. Last year I bought a new copy - flicking through the pages was like visiting old friends.

Having now spent years researching the history of archaeology, I’m familiar with some but by no means all of the ancient Egyptian pantheon. But my current focus on popular archaeology publishing has revealed a few books that were published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to make the British reading public more familiar with ancient Egyptian gods and goddesses and the stories associated with them.

One of the early 20th century authors I’ve come across is James Baikie. This Scottish vicar wrote fairly regularly for the publishers Adam & Charles Black on various topics both archaeological and scientific (he was a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society). His Wonder Tales of the Ancient World is a retelling in English of ancient Egyptian stories and legends recorded in papyri. It appeared in time for the Christmas in December 1915, priced at six shillings, and was marketed as the ideal gift for children.

Baikie's aim in writing Wonder Tales was to animate Egypt for his readers. Otherwise, he declared, Egypt would be “mainly interesting for old stones and old bones.” His first chapter set out the source of the stories for readers; he explained the system of writing in hieroglyphic and hieratic, and the use of papyrus reed rolls, which thousands of years after they were created were recovered by archaeologists and looters.

He drew on the works of archaeologists for the text, referencing among others Flinders Petrie’s popular Egyptian Tales books, which Methuen had published in chronological volumes in the 1890s. Egyptian Tales featured illustrations by the artist Tristram Ellis, who had spent time in Egypt gathering material to inform his work.

Wonder Tales is divided into three parts: Tales of the Wizards, Tales of Travel and Adventure and Legends of the Gods. Each part begins with a short explanation giving a bit of context to the stories that follow. The introductory text to the Legends of the Gods section offers an explanation for the complexity of the ancient Egyptian pantheon. Following that are five legends, featuring a host of gods and goddesses: Ra, Nut, Hathor, Thoth, Isis, Horus, Khonsu. Some of the stories are linked back to archaeologists – after “How Isis Stole the Great Name of Ra”, for example, Baikie includes an anecdote from Flinders Petrie’s Sinai expedition.

There are twelve coloured illustrations in Wonder Tales – the work of Baikie’s wife Constance N. Baikie (nee Turner Smith). They are rather splendid - I wish there were more of them. I’d love to find out more about Constance Baikie as an artist but she is proving to be fairly elusive in the historical record (so far). However, as she provided the illustrations for many of James Baikie’s books she had quite a prolific output.

It would be great to see these Egyptian gods and goddesses more often in popular culture today.* Perhaps a revamp of Baikie’s Wonder Tales would be in order. Any takers?

*Hamish Steele’s graphic novel Pantheon is a recent re-telling of some ancient Egyptian legends. The 2016 film Gods of Egypt, although introducing some of the ancient Egyptian pantheon, was justifiably criticised on many points.﻿﻿

By Amara Thornton​Inspired by some childhood favourites I received for Christmas, lately I’ve been looking into non-fiction archaeology books aimed at younger readers. I grew up reading the Usborne Time Traveller series which includes titles such as Pyramids and Pharaohs and Rome and Romans. A well-thumbed copy of Knights and Castles was loo-side reading for years. The series is still available, and was revised and reissued in the 1990s.

The archaeologist and author Mary Chubb is known (in archaeological circles at least) for her memoirs Nefertiti Lived Here and City in the Sand, recounting her experiences on archaeological excavations. But between 1966 and 1973 she also published a series for children, the Alphabet books. In each book she explains facets of archaeology and ancient history through a single word or concept, in alphabetical order. As she put it

​…an Alphabet makes a good, strong base to build on.”

​She based the books in part on ancient sites where she’d worked. It comes as no surprise therefore that the first book was An Alphabet of Ancient Egypt, reflecting Chubb’s initial experience in archaeology as the secretary/accountant for the Egypt Exploration Society’s excavations at Tell el-Amarna in the early 1930s, the subject of Nefertiti Lived Here. And what better way to begin than with A for Archaeologists,

...people who spend their lives finding out how men lived long ago."

In C for Cartouches Chubb explains how to read hieroglyphics. Opposite Chubb's text, Watts reproduces in large, visually accessible scale the cartouches of Pharaohs Akhenaten and Tutankhamun. Both were associated with Tell el-Amarna.

My personal favourite in An Alphabet of Ancient Egypt is X for X-Ray, in which Chubb describes the use of modern technology for understanding ancient lives. Watts's image of a radiographer x-raying a mummy accompanies the text. Its haunting caption:

Knowledge from Shadows"

Chubb's Alphabets for Assyria and Babylonia, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and the Holy Land followed. The Alphabet for Ancient Britain was advertised, but as far as I know never appeared. Her publisher, Geoffrey Bles, who produced all of her books, ironically was located on Doughty Street in London, just around the corner from the EES’s current offices today.

Mary Chubb died just over a decade ago in 2003. While Libri reissued Nefertiti and City as paperbacks in the 1990s, the Alphabets have never been republished. A shame, but perhaps potentially an opportunity for some enterprising publisher? Let’s hope so, the books are brilliant.*

References/Further ReadingAllen, T. with Henry V. 1990. The Time Traveller Book of Pharaohs and Pyramids. London: Usborne Publishing Limited.

Amery, H. and Vanags, P. 1989. The Time Traveller Book of Rome and Romans. London: Usborne Publishing Limited.

*On a related note, I’ve been watching David Walliams host a Channel 4 feature on the top 50 children’s books, highlighting a recent Times list of the top 100. There are some great authors featured: Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Enid Blyton (though I’d have gone for the Adventure series myself). Some others, disappointingly, weren’t part of the top 50, including Noel Streatfeild with Ballet Shoes (No. 75), and Elizabeth Goudge with The Little White Horse (No. 60).

In returning to the Usborne Time Traveller books I found an unexpected link to Noel Streatfeild, whose Shoes books I read voraciously. A very short list of further reading at the end of Pyramids included her non-fiction book The Boy Pharaoh, Tutankhamun, published by Michael Joseph in 1972, the same year as the famous exhibition Treasures of Tutankhamun opened at the British Museum.

Curious about the daily life of the Edwardian expat in Athens? Days in Attica is the book for you. Published in 1914, it's the work of Ellen Sophia Bosanquet, the Oxford-educated wife of the British School at Athens’ fifth Director Robert Carr Bosanquet.

Ellen Hodgkin and Robert Carr Bosanquet were married in 1902, two years into his term at the School. She went with him to Greece after their marriage, and lived there with him during the rest of his tenure as Director (1900-1906). Days in Attica is Bosanquet’s memoir of her life in Greece, a travel guide for leisured tourists, and a record of Athens and the surrounding landscape of Attica during a seeming calm before the storm of regional and world war.

It’s a fascinating read, partly because Bosanquet weaves tales of Greek myth and ancient history with references to specific objects, sites and excavations in a Greece that she clearly knows intimately in her own way. But the way she captures the domestic space is the most relevant for this post. In her chapter “Home Life in Attica” she describes the various characters who populate her household as servants. That’s where I came across a passing reference to “Cleopatra Pudding”.

The reference is part of a reflection on the characteristics of the Athenian cook. Bosanquet salutes a certain spirit of innovation in the face of (understandable) ignorance of British cuisine.

If I order ‘Cleopatra pudding’ the cook will set to work to make what he imagines ‘Cleopatra pudding’ ought to be rather than confess he has never met with it.”

I imagine many of us are guilty of such behaviour, at one time or another.

Like the cook of Bosanquet’s memory, I’d never heard of Cleopatra pudding either. Intrigued by the dessert’s homage to the famous Egyptian queen (I suppose) I felt a gauntlet had been metaphorically thrown down across the century since Days’ publication. I was determined to find out what Cleopatra’s pudding was and resurrect it. With a party, naturally.

Challenge accepted, the World Wide Web delivered: “The Week’s Best Recipe prize winners” on page 36 of the Australian Women’s Weekly for 12 January 1935 - bless Internet Archive. One of the recipes submitted, awarded a consolation prize of 2/6 - that’s two shillings and sixpence - was Cleopatra pudding. Eureka.

Miss M. Reynolds of New South Wales’ version of Cleopatra pudding calls for biscuit crumbs, desiccated coconut, eggs, sugar, milk and stewed apples. I can’t for the life of me see how these ingredients suggest ancient Egypt, but perhaps the link is in another version of the recipe. (If anyone has a clue, please tell me!) Nonetheless I had found what I was looking for, and invited some chums round to help me make it.

Here’s what we discovered for those of you who may want to try this at home...or abroad.

We used stewed apples rather than peaches or apricots, which were the suggested alternatives. Not favouring overly sweet desserts I made these beforehand using six Granny Smith apples, a tbsp of honey, and a tsp or so of vanilla. If, like me, you like your apples tart, look for the GSs with darker green skin and lighter green freckles.

A few helpful hints:

Use 1 ½ cups of biscuit crumbs (or try large crumbs rather than small). We used McVitie's Digestives.

Add another 2-3 tsp of coconut.

Oven temp should be 180-190°C.

I don't have an electric mixer, so one of my guests very kindly sacrificed her muscles and hand-whipped the egg yolks and sugar for about an hour. Unless you have someone generous with their energy as I did, use or borrow technology.

The result was actually quite tasty - a sort of spongy apple cake with a slight crunch from the coconut. Some of my guests added single cream on top.

As I’m currently researching the history of popular archaeology publishing, I’ve been steadily acquiring a library of books by archaeologists or about archaeology that have been long out of print. A second-hand copy of Days in Attica is one of my more recent acquisitions.

The copy I acquired is a first edition, printed in 1914. Days in Attica was published in the spring, by the autumn Britain was at war. So it was a poignant moment when I discovered my book was inscribed with a name and a date, thirteen days before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.

Less exacting travellers, especially those who are young and vigorous, may dispense with the expensive luxury of a courier and content themselves with the services of an Agogiates … or ordinary horse-boy."- Baedeker'sGreece: handbook for travellers(4th edn. 1909)

Agnes Conway Horsfield’s life has fascinated me for years. She is really the main force behind my interest in the history of archaeology. As I explained in a recent guest blogpost for the Micropasts project, her photographs got me started on the research that has been a significant part of my life for nearly a decade. As an archaeologist her work centred in the Middle East – particularly in Jordan, at Petra. But she didn’t go to the Middle East until the mid 1920s, when she was in her forties. One of the most interesting periods in her life (for me) occurred in the early part of 1914, when she and her friend Evelyn Radford turned into intrepid explorers wandering through the Balkans as students of the British School at Athens.

Agnes matured at a time when women’s lives were changing dramatically; luckily she could make the most of the opportunities that came her way. This was mainly because she had incredibly supportive parents who ensured that she had an education far superior to the education available to most women at the time. When she finished that education she travelled the Continent, pursued her research interests, wrote, and maintained a very active social life in London – activities underpinned by a regular allowance.

Her life in London is particularly fascinating; the number of (professional) working women in the city was increasing, and this fact is reflected in the society she kept. When based in London she occasionally lived in Chelsea and shared a flat with the writer and literary editor of the Westminster Gazette, Naomi Royde-Smith. I think the two of them had a comfortable quasi-Bohemian existence.

I’ve been lucky enough to spend a lot of time reading Agnes’s diaries and letters, which are spread out across different collections in Britain, as well as her early published work. This includes the book in which she chronicled her Balkan adventures – A Ride Through the Balkans, On Classic Ground with a Camera(1917).

It begins with an introduction written by her father, Sir (William) Martin Conway, who had by then authored several guidebooks to the Swiss Alps - he was an experienced mountaineer. His words expressed a longing for a past time when the Alps had not been “definitely engulfed in Touristdom, and threatened if not conquered by dress clothes.” They set the tone for the kind of journey Agnes and Evelyn undertook: the antithesis of middle-class Baedeker-bound travel. In the pages of A Ride, Agnes refers several times to the pleasures of travelling third-class and staying in out of the way locations. (For those Room With a Viewlovers out there, remember Miss Eleanor Lavish and her penchant for the “dear dirty back way” over more familiar tourist trails.)

As Agnes and Evelyn made their way across Greece and north as far as Montenegro, the ramifications of the recent Balkan Wars on the people they encountered became more and more apparent. In the chapter on Tempe, in Thessaly, is a poignant reference to the refugees’ lot.

The whole Balkan population at that time seemed on the move. Our boat was crammed with Greeks removing all their household goods to some new home in those parts which had not been devastated by the war.”

But it’s really when they arrive at Albanian Scutari (now Shkodër) that the narrative takes a more focused look at the political situation in the Balkans. Scutari had been a battleground between Ottoman and Montenegrin forces during the Balkan Wars; Montenegro captured the city in April 1913 but it was ultimately ceded to Albania.

When Agnes and Evelyn arrived in Scutari in spring 1914 an international force of 2,000 French, German, Austrian, Italian and English troops was occupying the city to keep the peace, with a British officer, Colonel George Fraser Phillips, in command. Colonel Phillips clearly made a striking impression on Agnes – the frontispiece illustration of A Ride shows him standing with an unidentified officer and a woman outside Scutari Castle.

Agnes praised Phillips’ relationships both with his Italian and Austrian colleagues and the local communities within and outside Scutari. She was fascinated by his work diffusing what she observed to be the local propensity for "blood feuds", painting a picture of Phillips as a benevolent leader whose combination of rationality and paternalism charmed the rough Albanian mountain-dwellers into more civilised behaviour.

When she returned to Britain, Agnes published “A Glimpse of Scutari”, an article on Phillips and the people of Scutari, in the Westminster Gazette where her Chelsea flatmate Naomi Royde-Smith worked. It appeared on 23 July 1914, just under a month after the assassination of Emperor Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, prefacing Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia by five days.

During the First World War, Agnes was involved in fundraising for Belgian soldiers, and, more significantly for women’s history, collecting objects to represent the role of women during the war for the new Imperial War Museum, of which her father, Martin Conway, was the first Director.*

A Ride was published before the end of the war, and in it Agnes was recording a fast-changing world. She began her chapter on Scutari with the words:

The outbreak of European war put an end to the international occupation of Scutari early in August, 1914. The state of things I am describing is, therefore, a chapter in the past…”

As I read the book, the immediacy of that statement hit home. This passage reminded me of what I have always found fascinating about archaeologists – that they are not just recorders of an ancient past, but observers and participators in a contemporary present.**

** A much more recent example of this is chronicled in a new book, Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble.And on a related note, a blogpost published this month from the National Archives presents an array of material relating to archaeologists working in intelligence during the First World War. Among the archaeologists highlighted is former BSA student and Director David George Hogarth, who was also Director of the Arab Bureau, a wartime intelligence agency based in Cairo.